Dyslexia - A different perspective: My experiences teaching children with dyslexia.

Friday, July 14, 2017

Why do Kids shut-down (Part 3)

Schools here and in most parts of the world teach the
alphabets as follows: a is for apple; b is for bed; c is for cat; d is for dog
…….. z is for zebra. All kids whether prone to shutting down or not will easily
learn these letter sounds. After this has been taught the teachers begin to
teach simple words and then simple sentences and slowly start building up the
vocabulary of the kids.

The problem is that, this way of teaching does not go down well
with children prone to shutting down. Allow me to explain this with the way I
teach kids who had shut down.

I start off teaching family words which you can find in the
internet. I start with bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, sat and rat. The kids
learn these words in no time at all.

Then, when I read to them the words ‘A cat’, I have seen
many of these kids staring at me as if I have said something weird. After
sometime when more and more kids did this I began to realize the reason for their
bewilderment. When I sounded out the alphabets in the family words, I sounded
out the alphabet ‘a’ in each of the family words as the ‘a’ sound in the word
apple - B-a-t, c-a-t, f-a-t and so on.

When I read out ‘A cat’ they stared at me as the sound of
‘A’ now is different from the sound of ‘a’ in the family words they had just
learned.Here the sound of ‘A’ is as in
the word ‘around/ about’ etc. This is when shutting –down begins.(In some countries the 'A' here will be pronounced as the letter sound 'A' in Ace.

I then tell my students that in the Malay language each
letter has only one sound except for the alphabet ‘e’ which has two different
phonemes (as in berok – monkey and besok - tomorrow) In Romanised Mandarin each letter has only one
phoneme/sound but not in the English language. All vowels in the English
Language have more than one sound and so do many of the consonants.

Each time I come to a new sound of the alphabet I point it
out to my students and they have no problem accepting what I say and thus are
able to read.

The 80% of kids who are not prone to shutting down learn and
pronounce words the way the teacher tells without questioning but not these kids who are prone to shutting
down. They need to be told explicitly that the alphabets have many sounds.

Here are examples of words where the sound of the letter ‘a’
is different in each list below the first list.

A as in
abide, ablaze, aboard, abode, around (listen to the sound of the letter a)

A as in
apple, abattoir, absolute, accident,(the sound of letter a here is different from that above)

A as in arm,
arctic, arch,(ditto)

A as in all,
also, alter, (……………………..ditto………………….
)

A as in ace,
ate, ache, (……………………..,,…………………..)

These kids
could have learned without shutting down if only the teacher had said that all
vowels and many consonants have more than one phoneme/sound but this is not
done and the kids shut down.

2 comments:

Kandiah Namasivayam
said...

Kandiah Namas: I have in my experience not come across any child, unble to read in Tamil language, once they have mastered all sounds formed by the 247 letters. Basically if they have learnt 12 vovel sounds and 18 consonant sounds, and the common strucural form to create the combinations of thse vovels and consonants, they are all ready. Thus all 247 letters will have only one unique individual sound each. No way two people read Tamil differently, let alone get confused about how to sound a letter.

Thank you sir, I have said the same thing for the past 10 over years with regards to learning to read in Malay and Romanised Mandarin but the guys who speak only one language - English- just don't seem to understand.